You publish a lot of quality content (trust us, we know). And so we understand that making it easily accessible to your faithful readers is very important for you as a blogger. Sure, our Categories, Tag Cloud, and Archives widgets do their parts, but we’ve come up with an extra little something that you may care to use.

Enter our newest shortcode – [archives].

This little guy will allow you to quickly and easily add a post index to anywhere on your blog (page, post, or text widget). Use the shortcode as is, and it will output a listing of all posts ever published on your blog. But it’s your show, so you get to decide what and how the shortcode generates your post index using a variety of options. Check out a number of examples of the shortcode being used here.

Ever want to see your weekly archives displayed in a drop-down menu? Now you can. Here’s ours:

Enjoy!

Say goodbye to messing around with HTML in a Text widget just to get an “About Me” in your sidebar. With the new Gravatar widget it only takes a few seconds to achieve this and stamp your blog as your own!

If you’re not familiar with a Gravatar it’s a graphical representation used to identify yourself, an avatar, in WordPress blogs and other sites.  It’s already built in to your WordPress.com account and can be found on your profile page.

This Gravatar widget allows you to quickly and simply add a Gravatar onto your blog.  You can select the Gravatar image, size, and even add a description about yourself or your blog. If you have multiple authors you can add several widgets – there’s no limit.

Setup is easy – go to Appearance->Widgets in your dashboard, drag the Gravatar widget from Available Widgets into the desired sidebar, and choose your settings.

You can choose the Gravatar of an existing blog author from the dropdown menu, or enter a custom email address if necessary.

You can choose one of four sizes for the Gravatar image itself, all of which fit easily into the sidebars of WordPress.com widget-enabled themes.

You can align the image to the left, right, or center, deciding how the text flows around the Gravatar.

Choose the URL you want the image to link to, if you want it to link to an “About Me” page or some other place, or leave this field blank if you don’t want the image to link anywhere.

Finally, enter the text you want to display below the image.  Include HTML too, if you want. Click Save and you’re finished!

And if you feel like it’s time for a new Gravatar remember that you can always modify your Gravatar from your profile page by uploading a new image or even using your webcam.

So what are you waiting for?

Step-by-step instructions for the Gravatar widget can be found on the Gravatar widget support page.

Here at WordPress.com, we always run the most recent version of the WordPress open source software. In addition, we do custom development so that we can offer features not included in the open source core product (like VideoPress, built-in polls, etc.). Because WordPress.com gets new features implemented as they are developed, we don’t usually talk too much about big version releases. For example, WordPress 2.8 was released recently, but we didn’t announce it here because WordPress.com blogs had already been running the new features (like the new widgets administration panel) before the big open source release occurred.

The open source project is getting started on development of version 2.9, which is expected to launch toward the end of this year. The reason I think it’s worth posting about this here on WordPress.com is that the focus of the 2.9 development is going to be improved media features, and improved media management is one of the most frequently requested things in the support forums, support emails, comments and at WordCamps.

There have been many suggestions for how to improve our media functions, so many that we can’t build all of them at once. For the next couple of days, there is a survey you can take to vote on which media features are the most important to you. This will help us prioritize the development. Are you dying for photo albums? A redesigned uploader? The ability to crop, resize or rotate your images? There are 11 proposed media features listed in the survey for you to rank in order of priority.

Descriptions of each proposed feature are provided at the beginning of the voting survey, so you’ll be sure to know what each what means. Only the first question (pick your top choice) is mandatory. This survey isn’t very long. Question two lets you assign a general high/low priority to each of the 11 feature suggestions, while question 3 asks you to rank the 11 features in order of priority from 1-11. A text box or two allow you to make additional suggestions, and that’s it. The survey is anonymous, and will be open until Friday, July 10, 2009 at 11:59 PM UTC.

Vote now!

Remember National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) back in November? You all used the opportunity to take a swing at churning out a 50,000-word novel on your blogs in only one month — some with great success!

There’s also NaBloPoMo, which has nothing to do with post-modernism, but with blogging! It stands for National Blog Posting Month.

It’s an even more fitting occasion for posting regularly to your blog on the topics that interest you. And maybe the best part is that it starts whenever you want it to! The only objective is to post every day for a month. So why not begin with July? To make it official, sign up here. It’s open to anyone with a blog, anywhere in the world.

The NaBloPoMo team provides a theme for each month, which isn’t mandatory, but is a nice way to gain inspiration that can kick off your daily updates.

Not into that? Then we suggest sticking to the stuff you’ve been blogging about all along — the things you experience and love — with the added caveat of keeping it on the regular.

If you run out of steam, you can always find ways to blog about the dozens of weird celebrations and holidays that take place in July, in addition to Independence Day in the U.S. — like Ice Cream Soda Day, Video Games Day, or Bugs Bunny’s Birthday.

To plug the WordPress community into your endeavor, we suggest using NaBloPoMo09 as a tag on each post you publish to your blog. They’ll show up on the tag results page, which is also a great place to get inspired by your fellow bloggers.

A note: Please refrain from commenting with questions about NaBloPoMo in response to this post. It’s not a WordPress project. Instead, check out their FAQ to learn more about its objectives and requirements.

Happy (daily) blogging!

Last month we launched the Yahoo! App and 360 importer so you can migrate your content to WordPress.com quickly and easily. And we introduced the SocialVibe widget, which helps you earn donations for the charity of your choice. July will bring more feature updates, and more of the themes and customizations you’ve been asking for. We’re listening.

Here are the stats for June:

• 388,580 blogs were created.
• 5,845,417 posts were published.
• 411,540 new users joined.
• 5,800,941 file uploads.
• 3,633 gigabytes of new files.
• 810 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
• 8,330,617 comments.
• 6,841,633 logins.
• 1,245,935,191 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,245,882,985 on self-hosted blogs (2,491,818,176 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
• 2,153,176 active blogs where “active” means they got a human visitor.
• 1,447,021,840 words.

Plus:

You published 37,894 posts using the WordPress for iPhone app.

The new GigaOM Pro launched, powered by BuddyPress.

WordCamps in June: WordCamp Chicago, WordCamp RDU, WordCamp Brasil, and WordCamp Dallas.

WordCamps coming up in July: WordCamp Montreal and WordCamp UK.